Bakersfield Blaze

56

Some of the more abstract names in sports are a little hard to create logos for. This is especially a problem for women's soccer, which seems to have this unwritten rule that you can't name a team after something with a physical existence. This may sound like a joke, but the teams in the Women's United Soccer Association were the Beat, Breakers, Charge, Courage, CyberRays, Freedom, Power, and Spirit; Women's Professional Soccer brings back two of these names, and adds the Red Stars, Gold Pride, Sol, Athletica, and Sky Blue. That's thirteen team names, with only two of them being things you can actually draw. Furthermore, two of their three expansion teams introduce new, undrawable names (Independence and Sting), while the third resurrects another WUSA name. The W-League and WPSL aren't much better.

Of course, baseball is rife with such names, too. Just in the Major League Baseball you've got the Athletics, Mets, Phillies, Nationals, Reds, Astros, and Dodgers. Minor league baseball introduces such gems as the Legends, Jammers, and Miracle. And these guys.

Technically, this team shouldn't be on that list. Technically, you can draw a blaze. But from the logo it's clear that no one told these guys. So instead we get this: a logo that would be at home at the top of an album cover by some semi-talented 80s metal band. In fact, there is a metal band called Blaze and an 80s band called Blaze, but they're not the same band. Neither of them used this logo. That's probably a good thing, because any band using this logo would undeniably be totally lame. I haven't heard the bands in question, so they may be totally lame anyway. But they don't use this logo, so at least there's hope.

It's not just that cramming the word blaze into an elongated octagon (why an octagon?) is a bad idea. It's also done poorly. Most of the white spaces are kept fairly small, but then you have the large, Y-shaped white space between the L and the A. It wouldn't have been so bad had the A not been angled the way it did. Every time I look at this logo, my mind fills in the space and turns it into "Blyaze". What's a blyaze? And don't tell me it's the name of a lame 80s metal band. I've already used that joke once in this review.

The odd thing is that they do have a half-way decent logo. To the right you will see the team's cap insignia. It looks kind of neat. the juxtaposition of the straight lines on the letters and the jagged edges of the flames is an interesting contrast, the colors all work together, and the designer pulled off the symmetry quite nicely. There's just one problem, which is that it looks bizarre. What the hell is that thing? It looks like a robotic butterfly sitting on a burning maple leaf. Why anyone would make a robotic butterfly in the first place is beyond me; if you did make one, why would you put it on a burning maple leaf?

But it could be worse. In fact, it used to be worse. If you'll look now to the left, you'll see an older logo for the team. You may note that this is not too dissimilar to the logo the Diablos Rojos de México use. It's a better logo for a team called "Blaze" then for a team called "Red Devils", but it's still not a good logo. But really, what else could you do? You ultimately have three choices. You can make a logo like the one to the left. Or you can totally chicken out and make a logo like the one at the top of the page. Or you can just decide you're going to come up with something totally boffo like the cap insignia above. All in all, the boffo approach is probably the best one. If I designed a logo, I'd much rather people's reaction to it be "WTF?" than "yawn".

But you know what would be an even better approach?

Convincing the owners to come up with a better name. Because abstract names like this usually stink, and the logo at the top of the page is a perfect example of why.

Final Score: 56 points.
Penalties: Singular, 15 pts; Alliteration, 5 pts; Letter, 24 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: None.